Are Alfred Hitchcock episodes starring James Franciscus about to become the focus of this blog? Sad to say, I don't think there are enough of them to keep the concept going. Still, it's a nice thought.
"Summer Shade" is one of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes that came after Rod Serling made a splash with The Twilight Zone, and it's not shy about swimming in the same pool. A married couple (Franciscus and Julie Adams) drive around Salem, Massachusetts, looking for a home where they can raise their daughter (Susan Gordon). Just as they're ready to give up, they find a quaint house that the owner (Charity Grace) is putting up for sale. The daughter is happy there, but the parents are concerned that she's spending too much time with her imaginary friend, a friend whom she seems to have made up after reading an ancient tome on Puritan New England.
Going further into spoiler territory would do nothing to elucidate what makes this story work. It's just too weird, and that's what makes it work, partly. The setting is Salem, and while the Witch Trials took place in what is now known as Danvers, most fiction has always found that irrelevant. In this case the city of Salem is presented, albeit tacitly, as a tourist trap where the reputation of black magic is as vital to it as the beaches are to Atlantic City. Real estate signs show witches on brooms, and the woman selling the house wears a witch hat, which the protagonists don't even think anything of.
Everyone commits to the weirdness, and I would make an educated guess that this starts with Nora H. Caplan, who wrote the original short story. The weirdness isn't random. It points in a certain direction. And it defines everything, even the details that seem mundane. That's what it means to have a vision.
2 comments:
You made me curious so I watched it this afternoon - yet another of Alfred Hitchcock's low key television stories. It's funny to watch any of them again and realize just how cautious was the writing and the acting; the performances were stiff but, even though you guess the twist, the story was still compelling enough to hold your attention because of the pace.
I don't know what regulations were in place for what could be shown in the early days of television but the reserve was apparent in Hitchcock's Presentations. He was more than capable of devising horrific situations in movies and his tv show profited from that little frisson of potential danger to the audience - many of whom were children as I can attest. Hitchcock's reputation for menace made his television shows very succesful but Psycho wasn't on the program.
I wonder how Lettie and Kay are getting along nowadays?
It is interesting to observe because the stiffness of this show as well as others like The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, etc was part of an aesthetic, one which was born out of the practical needs of the creators. Lots of younger viewers, especially, take a brief look at this stuff and assume it's all crap. For years I did the opposite, dismissing most new movies as idiotic. Neither view is right.
The main restriction I know was placed on Alfred Hitchcock Presents is that anyone shown getting away with a crime onscreen had to have their off-screen punishment explained to the viewer. So you can choose which version to believe based on your own sympathies. By contrast the sponsors seem to have been tickled by Hitchcock insulting them. Psycho used some of the TV show's crew but benefited from the film industry's loosened production codes, themselves a recent and ongoing phenomenon.
Fun fact: Judy grew up to be the navigator in the first Alien movie.
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